2/02/2010 @ 6:00PM

Me And My 39,000 Friends

I’m new to Twitter, and like most tweeting newbies I have a problem: I don’t have enough friends. In fact after two weeks, 75 tweets and hours spent obsessing, I have only 137 followers, the vast majority of whom I know personally. This is pathetic.

From a time management perspective I would have been better off throwing a large party and requiring guests to speak only in 140-character bursts–the more self-promotional the better. Actually this is not unlike many Manhattan parties attended by media types, so perhaps it’s little surprise that Twitter has been so avidly adopted by the chattering class.

For those of you who have successfully resisted the latest social media craze, Twitter is the so-called micro-blogging site where users can post very short messages (shorter than this sentence), typically consisting of a sliver of commentary and a link to a Web page or a photo. The catch is that only your “followers” automatically receive these pointillistic communiqués, so the more followers you have, the more (theoretically) influential you are. Naturally this has touched off something of a follower arms race.

I am not immune to such competitive pressures, especially once I realized some of my past and present colleagues have thousands of followers. After a little poking around on the Internet, mostly consisting of Googling the phrase “How Can I Get More Twitter Followers” (which yields 44 million results, including 12 sponsored links) and studying the list of the top Twitter user rankings published on Twitterholic.com, I learned a few things.

First it helps to be famous. Ashton Kutcher has the most Twitter followers of anyone (4.5 million) followed closely by Britney Spears (4.3 million). Both are more popular than Barack Obama (3.2 million), who slightly edges out Oprah Winfrey (3.1 million).

Failing actual fame, Internet fame is a good substitute. A good example of this is my friend and former Forbes colleague Om Malik (1.3 million followers), who ranks 11th on our annual list the biggest Web celebrities largely on the basis of his widely followed technology blog GigaOm.

Not being actually famous, or even particularly Internet-famous, I briefly considered buying friends. A site called purchasetwitterfriends.com, just one of many of its ilk, offered to sell me 10,000 new best friends for just 35 bucks. But upon reflection, this seemed just too sad and desperate, even for a schlub like me, who has only 137 friends.

Finally, I stumbled across what I fondly have termed the “bat-crap-crazy obsessive compulsive” method, perfected by John Cox, a 49-year-old IT consultant living in Redmond, Wash. Cox’s method turns pretty much exclusively on a bit of Twitter etiquette: When someone follows you, it is considered polite to follow them back (genuine celebrities, Web celebrities and even mildly famous writers are excluded from this recursive politesse. Despite her 3.1 million followers, Oprah only follows 18 people herself.)

Cox, who last spring found himself with more time of his hands than he might otherwise wish, took it upon himself to grow his Twitter following from a humble 100 to 16,000 in less than three months without using any artificial methods. Essentially he began following anywhere between 200 and 1,000 people every single day, wrote up to 50 posts a day, and using a site called buzzom.com, ruthlessly culled anyone who did not follow him back. Putting in about four hours a day, he reached his goal of 16,000 followers in about 10 weeks. (There are some subtleties to this method, best explained by Cox himself on his blog.)

One side effect of the bat-crap-crazy obsessive compulsive method is that you end up following almost exactly the same number of people who follow you. As of this writing, Cox, who tweets under the handle jcx27, has 38,939 followers and he follows 38,813 people. Unfortunately following so many people renders Twitter unusable in important ways. Cox, for instance, says he can’t effectively use Twitter on a mobile device, and it is impossible to reach him via the service’s direct messaging service, since he receives hundreds of messages a day.

Cox, an affable Englishman who also writes young adult fantasy fiction (think Lord of the Rings) under the pen name Paul Dorset, cheerfully acknowledges the limitations of his approach, which he undertook as a personal challenge. “There wasn’t any long-term objective,” he says. Nor would he advise anyone else to follow his lead. “Oh, good God, no. I mean if someone really wanted to do it, I guess they could. It’s a free world and all.” But with nearly 40,000 people following him (and hundreds more added every day) he doesn’t feel like he can walk away from it.

All of which makes me feel a lot better about my measly 137 followers. I could walk away and no one would miss me at all.